With 20K+ paying customers and new leadership, our focus expands to enterprise and international growth

With 20K+ paying customers and new leadership, our focus expands to enterprise and international growth

Reflecting on my first year at Asana after both helping scale the Google Cloud business for almost five years, and more than 20 years in enterprise technology generally, I’m more excited than I’ve ever been to help teams do great things together, through great software for work.

Asana was born out of a visceral need for teams and organizations to coordinate better, so they can work together effortlessly and achieve results faster. Today, even at the world’s greatest companies, there are still constant challenges to keeping everyone on the same page — and way too much time is spent on “work about work” instead of getting work done. The business imperative to address these challenges is growing daily: the bigger your team, the bigger your mission, the bigger your coordination problem.

Despite amazing product innovation in cloud communications and content collaboration over the past several years, most teams still struggle with the most fundamental questions around great execution and achieving results: “Does our team know who’s responsible for what, by when, at any given moment? Ultimately, are things on track? Will our team actually achieve our stated goals?” There is still an incredible lack of clarity around these everyday questions.

“Despite amazing product innovation in cloud communications and content collaboration over the past several years, most teams still struggle with the most fundamental questions around great execution and achieving results.”

At Asana, our aim is to (finally) bring this clarity to teams, to meet the growing business imperative for clarity of purpose, plan, and responsibility at work — from the CEO to the interns. That’s why Asana exists, and why I’m here. We’re off to a great start: we recently surveyed 3,000+ of our customers, and heard back that Asana is helping their teams achieve better results, faster, with greater clarity. In fact, the average customer says that Asana makes them 45-percent more effective overall, and increases clarity, responsibility, and accountability on their teams by more than 80 percent!

In 2017, we’re scaling our growing business and investing in our product to help more teams across the world and larger enterprise teams work together effortlessly. Today, we’re excited to announce three key new developments:

We’ve brought on new executive leadership to help us scale and grow our business globally from small businesses to larger enterprises

We’re now helping more than 20,000 paying customers plan, prioritize, manage, and track their work in Asana

This year, we are adding an enterprise tier to our offering to support our growth and adoption in larger enterprises, and expanding our international focus

New leadership to help us scale and grow the business globally

Welcome, Tim Wan from Google’s Apigee, as Asana’s first head of global finance
Tim will ensure we continue to scale and grow our business, while maintaining an award-winning workplace in which Asanas thrive. As CFO of Apigee, a leading SaaS provider of API platform technology and services for enterprises and developers, Tim successfully led the company through its IPO and eventual acquisition by Google. We’re thrilled to welcome Tim as he focuses on helping us capture the large market opportunity in front of us and building Asana for the long term.

Welcome, Oliver Jay from Dropbox, as Asana’s first head of global sales
Over the last five years, we’ve established a strong self-service revenue engine driven primarily by word-of-mouth customer adoption. As inbound interest grows across the globe and we see increasing demand for larger customer deployments, we’re delighted to announce that Oliver Jay is joining the company as our first head of global sales. Oliver joins us from Dropbox, where he built and led the online and inside Dropbox Business sales teams. He later led the expansion and P&L for Dropbox in Asia Pacific.

Business milestone: more than 20,000 paying customers manage and track work better with Asana

Asana is pioneering a new category of business software that’s still in its early days. Our mission involves helping all teams better track and manage their work, to achieve their goals and take on bigger ones.

Today we celebrate having more than 20,000 paying customers working towards these goals. Recently, global teams at organizations as diverse as AB InBev, Bed Bath & Beyond, and Overstock.com joined existing customers — from Uber, Snap, Stripe, and Spotify, to Malala Fund, Possible Health and NASA — in tracking and managing their work with greater clarity and efficiency. In fact, Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne told us that Asana has been “like lightning in a bottle” for Overstock; he “can’t recall something else that’s come in and propagated so quickly with so little proselytization across the company. People rave about Asana.”

The CEO of Overstock.com recently told us that Asana “is like lightning in a bottle”

Last year we invested heavily in expanding the kinds of work Asana can help customers manage — from the introduction of Custom Fields, to launching Boards for visualization of shared work, to making workflows even more efficient through Templates — accommodating any type of team taking on any type of work. As we enter our next phase of growth, we’re already seeing more teams choose Asana to replace the endless emails, ad-hoc tools, redundant status meetings, and traditional, rigid project management software. We can’t wait to help even more teams choose clarity over chaos in 2017.

Going global and a new focus on enterprise: expanding our offering to help more teams thrive

Asana is ultimately the place where any team or department can better organize and manage their projects, processes, and programs — from marketing to HR to product development to operations — and our vision is to empower companies to roll out Asana broadly across their organizations in order to work smarter and get more done. Last year we saw the number of larger deployments of Asana more than double, and we’re excited to be launching a full-fledged enterprise tier offering for Asana customers in 2017. We’ll be investing even more in IT-admin, security, and advanced workflow features to accommodate the growing demand for Asana in large, complex organizations.

We are also expanding our focus internationally; currently, international business represents more than a third of our revenue. Building on this early success, we are ramping up our international go-to-market and product investments to meet increasing global demand for Asana in 2017.

As the demand for great work tracking software continues to grow, 2017’s already off to a great start here at Asana, and we’re excited to share more developments throughout the year.